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Cohn took papers from Trump’s desk to protect NAFTA, Woodward book alleges

By David JacksonUSA Today

Wed., Sept. 5, 2018

WASHINGTON—White House Chief of Staff John Kelly denied describing President Donald Trump as an “idiot,” as Trump and his aides sought to push back Tuesday on a new book by veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward that depicted the West Wing as “Crazytown.”

In the first of two tweets, Trump cited denials by Kelly and other aides in claiming that “their quotes were made up frauds, a con on the public.” He suggested that Woodward — whom he praised just last month — is a Democratic operative who timed the book to this year’s congressional elections. “Notice timing?” he said.

White House chief of staff John Kelly and then-staff secretary Rob Porter walk along the South Lawn of the White House in November. “It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually,” Bob Woodward quotes Porter as saying. Kelly and other Trump aides have since denied allegations in Woodward’s book. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post file photo)

Trump also tweeted out written statements by aides on the Woodward book, including one from his chief of staff.

“The idea I ever called the President an idiot is not true,” Kelly said, adding that the claim “is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration’s many successes.”

Kelly repeated a statement he made in May, saying that he and Trump “have an incredibly candid and strong relationship.”

Nearly four hours after his first tweet about the book, Trump tweeted again, this time at 11:01 p.m. EST to deny that he labelled Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “mentally retarded” and a “dumb southerner” in what he called the “already discredited Woodward book.”

“I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing,” Trump tweeted. “He made this up to divide!”

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Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who once called Trump “unfit for office,” emerged as one of his staunchest defenders in Congress in the 24 hours after the first reports about Trump’s harrowing portrayal in Woodward’s book.

“President @realDonaldTrumps fate will be determined by the results he achieves for the American people, not by a book about the process,” Graham said in Wednesday morning tweets. “By any reasonable measure we have one of the strongest economies in modern history, President Trump has rebuilt a broken military, and we are pushing back hard against America’s enemies.”

Titled Fear: Trump in the White House, the Woodward book is scheduled to be published Sept. 11.

Woodward, who rose to fame via his coverage of the Watergate scandal during the Richard Nixon presidency in the early 1970s, is an associate editor at the Washington Post, which published excerpts of the book Tuesday.

The excerpts described a struggle by aides to rein in Trump.

Regarding the fraught relationship between the president and his chief of staff, the Post reported Woodward found that Kelly “frequently lost his temper” over Trump, and that he thought the president was “unhinged.”

“He’s an idiot,” Kelly said, according to the Post’s account of Woodward’s book. “It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Trump himself said Woodward has “credibility problems” — though the president told the author last month he thought he had always been fair.

“I probably would have preferred to speak to him, but maybe not,” Trump told the Daily Caller website. “I think it probably wouldn’t have made a difference in the book. He wanted to write the book a certain way.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders attributed the book’s criticism of Trump to “disgruntled” former aides.

The Postpublished what it said was a conversation Woodward had with Trump after the book was finished. The author detailed how the White House rebuffed his requests for an interview with the president.

At one point, Trump told Woodward: “You know I’m very open to you. I think you’ve always been fair. We’ll see what happens. But all I can say is the country is doing very well.”

The White House denials echoed those made about previous critical books, particularly those by journalist Michael Wolff and former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.

In the wake of the White House attacks, Woodward told the Post he stands by his reporting.

Among Woodward’s other revelations:

Former defence attorney John Dowd and colleagues did not want Trump to testify before Russia special counsel Robert Mueller because they didn’t think he could tell the truth. The book discusses a mock interview that attorneys conducted with Trump in which the president fared poorly, and that lawyers re-enacted parts of that interview for Mueller himself.

“Don’t testify,” Dowd was quoted by Woodward as saying. “It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

In a statement emailed to USA Today, Dowd said he has not read the book and does not plan to address “every inaccurate statement” attributed to him, but he denied he replayed the mock interview before Mueller, that he questioned the president’s truthfulness and that he made the remark attributed to him about the orange jumpsuit.

Former economic adviser Gary Cohn removed papers from Trump’s desk to block efforts to remove the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, as well as a separate trade deal with South Korea.

In his interview with the Daily Caller, Trump denied that aides have removed documents from his view, saying “it’s just made up” and that “there was nobody taking anything from me.”

Trump told Defence Secretary Jim Mattis he wanted to have Syrian leader Bashar Assad assassinated after evidence surfaced of a chemical weapons attack on rebels in that country; Mattis ignored the request and planned the targeted missile strike on chemical weapons facilities that Trump eventually approved.

Woodward also reported that Mattis once described Trump as acting like a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” prompting a denial by the defence secretary.

Mattis said in a statement that he never uttered “contemptuous words” about the president, and added that Woodward’s “anonymous sources do not lend credibility” to his book.

In her statement, Sanders called the Woodward book “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the president look bad.”

Late Tuesday night, Trump tweeted links to stories by the Daily Caller and Breitbart News that highlighted Mattis’ denial of the claims in Woodward’s book.

With files from the Washington Post

U.S. President Donald Trump is labeling a tell-all book from journalist Bob Woodward a "work of fiction."

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